Currently, many different steps need to be taken to connect two or more computing devices. For example, to connect a smart phone to a desktop computer by way of a computer network, a user has to look up a network address and other parameters of the desktop computer. The user then needs to unlock the smart phone and initiate a network connectivity application on the smart phone to input the network address and other parameters such that the two devices can locate and communicate with each other.
Developers often set up connections between devices in the development of software applications. It should be appreciated that every type of client computing device has its own set of software and hardware, which can render the same content differently. Accordingly, in one example, a Web developer typically needs to connect his desktop computer, which is used to design Web pages, to multiple client devices to see how the same Web pages are rendered on the different client devices. In a typical development workflow, the developer designs a Web page on the desktop computer, loads the Web page on each client device, and inspects the appearance of the Web page on the different types of client devices. If any incremental change is made to the Web page, the modified Web page needs to be loaded again on each client device.
However, the process of establishing a connection with each client device can be time consuming and labor intensive, meaning that for every client device, a developer has to configure each client device manually such that it can connect to the desktop computer. The process can be even more manually intensive when one or more client devices are disconnected from the desktop computer, thereby necessitating the developer to identify which of the devices has been disconnected and then manually repeating all the steps described above to connect to the desktop computer.